Bucks likely to approve prison wall for visitors

Partition with glass would separate inmate from family to keep out drugs.

October 22, 2002|By Hal Marcovitz Of The Morning Call

With drugs and other contraband still finding their way into Bucks County Prison, members of the panel that oversees the institution appear likely to approve construction of a wall in the prison's visitation center that will separate inmates from their family members.

Corrections officials had hoped for the Bucks County Prison Oversight Board's approval of the $30,000 partition on Monday, but board members delayed a vote until their Nov. 14 meeting.

Controller Raymond McHugh, a member of the board, said he wanted to hear opinions of groups or people opposing the wall before he votes on it.

Erection of the wall would eliminate "contact visitation" at the maximum-security prison in Doylestown Township. For more than a year, inmates and their visitors have been permitted to exchange brief kisses before and after they meet, but at all other times they are prohibited from touching.

That has been the policy since the summer of 2001, when a grand jury concluded that inmate Michael Fadako died from an overdose of drugs that had been passed to him by his girlfriend during a meeting in the prison visitation room.

Until that time, inmates and their visitors were permitted to embrace and congregate in groups in the visitation room. Now, they must remain seated in aisles patrolled by guards.

Warden Willis Morton said the new policy has been only partially successful. He said visitors still find ways to pass drugs to the inmates, usually by just waiting until the guard's attention is drawn elsewhere.

"Most of the visitors wait for the officers to be distracted -- that's when the exchange takes place," he said. "When they kiss, we're watching them."

On one occasion, Morton said, guards caught an inmate with drugs. The inmate's visitor confessed to passing the drugs to her boyfriend, investigators said. But when prison officials reviewed videotapes of the exchange, Morton said, it was impossible to tell when the drugs were passed.

The proposed partition would comprise 19 booths where inmates could sit facing their visitors, observing them through glass that Morton described as similar to a "bank teller's window."

Shortly after the grand jury report was issued, the inmate advocacy group Bucks Association for Corrections and Rehabilitation asked the prison board to maintain contact visitations in some fashion.

George Oppenheimer, association president, said he would expect to make another statement to the Prison Oversight Board before its Nov. 14 vote.

"We want to maintain the integrity of the family," said Oppenheimer.

"Children, in particular, should have a chance to run and hug a mother or father who is in prison. This is obviously going to create a greater impasse to that activity. There could be no hugging at all."